1. Field of Invention
The present invention relates to a method of selecting and presenting content and, more specifically, to a method of dynamically combining and organizing content into hierarchical clusters to facilitate user discovery of desired information.
2. Description of Related Art
One measure of the usability of an information finding and presentation system on input and/or display constrained devices is the effort expended by the user in the discovery of desired information (the discovery of information could be text based search, browsing a content space, or some combination of both). One method of minimizing the effort expended to find information (either via search or browse techniques) on input and display constrained devices is the use of incremental search techniques. The use of incremental search, where results are retrieved as user types in each character, is far superior to full word search interfaces on input constrained device, because incremental search reduces the amount of text the user must input (See, for example, the techniques presented in the applications incorporated below).
However, one of the challenges in an incremental search system is to present the most relevant results to the user even when the input is sparse or is of an ambiguous nature, such as input using an overloaded keypad with multiple alphanumeric characters mapped to the same physical key. For example, a pure lexical match on incremental input would fail to yield good results where exact matches on prefixes are rated as more relevant than partial word matches. Furthermore, if the input method is using an overloaded keypad, generating an ambiguous text input, then the problem is even worse.
In addition, ambiguous text inputs can match a wide variety of results because of the nature of the ambiguous input. This is so because the ambiguous input not only represents the search input intended by the user, but can also represent other words or phrases. For example, using the well-known 12-key telephone keypad, the input “227” represents both “car” and “bar”, which can match very different results. Thus, while incremental, ambiguous text input is a convenient way to enter search input on an input constrained device, the increase in the amount of results returned can be cumbersome on a display constrained device, where only a few entries in a result set are visible.